Naperville's new lifeline

Devices can lead cops to missing residents

Among the many challenges Nancy Wiskari faces as the mother of a 4-year-old autistic boy is the constant fear that he will bolt from the family's Naperville home and disappear.

It happened last year, when a neighbor's child left the gate of a back-yard fence unlocked. Carson, then 3, made it just three blocks, but there's a constant fear that next time the family won't be so lucky, Wiskari said.

So when Wiskari learned the Naperville Police Department would be the first in the Chicago area to join a program that helps police quickly locate missing children or senior citizens with disabilities such as autism, Alzheimer's disease or Down syndrome, she did not hesitate to participate.

Project Lifesaver uses a tiny radio, strapped to the wrist or ankle of someone with disabilities, to emit a signal that helps locate them. The Naperville Exchange Club paid the $7,700 to equip the Police Department with several hand-held receivers that pick up the radio signals and to train officers and other members of the city's Elderly Services Team to use them.

"It will make me sleep a little bit easier at night," Wiskari said. "He can still bolt, and he can still get into danger before we find him, but at least we know where to look."

On Wednesday, teams of officers trained by scouring the front lawn of the Naperville Police Department hunting for hidden transmitters.

Each chip transmits a specific low-frequency signal so the chips do not interfere with each other. The signals can be picked up within about 1 square mile on the ground and from about 5 miles away by air.

Wednesday's hunt involved three groups of officers, each led by an officer with an antenna in one hand and a receiver around the neck. With each step the searcher took toward a chip, the receiver chirped like a bird. The closer the group got to the chip, the louder the box chirped.

To get a transmitter, which resembles a faceless wristwatch, a Naperville resident must pay a $277 fee, essentially the cost of the transmitter, then agree to pay $10 a month for batteries and other upkeep.

So far, 15 families have signed up for the program, about half with senior citizens and half with disabled children, said Marita Manning, crime prevention specialist for the department.

The technology is just the latest program Naperville has launched to benefit seniors. Not only does the city have an Elderly Services Team to assist senior citizens, but the Police Department maintains a database of photographs and contact information for about 400 senior citizens who are at risk of wandering from their homes.

The department also has a voluntary program to check up on seniors. Seniors who participate receive an automated telephone call each day and enter a predetermined code to indicate they are OK. If the call is not answered, an officer will check on the senior's well being, said Sgt. Joel Truemper.

Such programs have reduced the number of times that Naperville police officers are called out to search for a missing senior citizen or a child with a disability to just a few times a year, Truemper said.

But those few times that such searches are necessary can be costly and frustrating.

A foot search for a missing person costs about $1,500 an hour and on average lasts about nine hours, said Teresa Faesi, deputy assistant director of Project Lifesaver and an officer with the Chesapeake, Va., Sheriff's Department, where the program began six years ago.

In that time, more than 1,100 searches have been performed using the radio transmitters. Every one of them was successful, and the average length of time it took to recover a person was 22 minutes, Faesi said.

Naperville Detective Chuck Baker, who was trained to use the equipment Wednesday, said he wished he had it a couple of years ago when he was hunting for an elderly man from Chicago who disappeared while visiting family on Naperville's north side. The search lasted more than a week and involved officers from Naperville and the Illinois State Police. It ended a few hundred yards from where it began, in a retaining pond the man had stumbled into and drowned.

"This is going to be great technology when the people that need them wear the bracelets," Baker said.

Melanie Chavin, vice president for program services of the Alzheimer's Association of Illinois, said Project Lifesaver is addressing a problem faced by many families.

"The majority of people with Alzheimer's disease are going to wander and get lost," Chavin said. "It's a dangerous situation. They may not be able to tell you where they live. They may not be able to tell you their name."

The Alzheimer's Association keeps a national database of contact information provided by relatives of Alzheimer's patients that police officers can consult, Chavin said, but the database only helps if an Alzheimer's patient is found.

"We do know if a person is not found within the first 24 hours, then the chances rise dramatically that the person might be seriously hurt or wind up dead," Chavin said.

"If we could get this established in other communities around Chicago," she said, "oh, how fabulous that would be."